It looks like someone’s angry – Motorola just sued a whole bunch of people, Huawei and more than a dozen former Motorola employees, for “conspiring to steal” its wireless and other proprietary technologies, since 2001.
While the suit was first filed in 2008 against 4 former employees and Lemko, it turns out that Motorola uncovered the fact that this “conspiracy” was quite a bit older and more pervasive than they first assumed, and had been taking place right under their noses for the past nine years. The most specific example of attempted theft in the lawsuit is the technology behind a 3G base station, called SC300.
The latest information was found when one of the accused Motorola employees was arrested at an American airport about to board a flight to China, with over 1,000 pages worth of Motorola wireless technology documentation in tow, along with $30,000 in cash. The next major break in the case was when another employee was caught delivering Motorola mobile phones to Lemko for reverse engineering purposes, along with unlock codes and dump files.
All this certainly seems sinister, and Motorola claims it has evidence that Huawei was aware it was receiving proprietary tech from these sources.